This is a picture of Rebekah's heart. Number 1 points to the conduit that was put in when she was 5 days old and has been replaced with each surgery. She was born without the connection between her heart and lungs. Pretty amazing that they are able to fix such a thing. In order to compensate for the lack of connection, her heart neglected to form a wall to separate the two ventricles. In the last surgery they put a patch in (number 3) and it stayed in the middle. However it tore away on the top and the bottom part of the patch creating two Ventricle Septal Defects (VSD). Number 2 represents the larger of the two. During her cath lab they put a "plug" in the larger VSD. It's similar to a rivet or a foam ear plug that fills the space it's put in.
You can see the device in the x-ray. It's labeled "C" and is a little harder to see, but it's there. "B" is her heart - or at least part of it. "A" labels the wires that hold her rib cage together after her open-heart surgeries. (They have to cut it open each time. Do you think she'd set off a metal detector?) :) "D" points to the wire/tube that they used to put the device in her heart. They figure out where they are in the body by shooting dye into her blood stream and then using x-ray to track the dye. Truly amazing. We're very grateful for the doctor's that have helped her have a life worth living. It was our shortest hospital stay yet and we stayed 3 days. I'm not sure if that's sad or incredible.
I do have to say that having Rebekah has given me a lot of perspective for my trials. Because we're in the hospital a lot, we meet a lot of people who's trials I would never want to trade for. Just this time through I witnessed a mother right after she was told her 9 year-old had a tumor that was much larger than anticipated and spread throughout the brain stem. Makes me very grateful for my own set of trials. I was reminded this weekend that children really are "an heritage from the Lord". I know I sure love mine.
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